What is A-A-P?

The A-A-P project makes developing, distributing, downloading, building and installing software easier. Aap is the main program of the A-A-P project.

Since the author of Vim is also the project leader for A-A-P, there are a few connections between the two: Aap is used to build and distribute Vim, Vim is the preferred editor in A-A-P.

More information about A-A-P can be found here.

Update runtime files

When you obtain the latest version of Vim and apply all the patches, you still don't have the latest version of the runtime files (syntax highlighting, indenting, filetype plugins, etc.). That is because no patches are made for them.

The recommended way is to use the git repository at github. You can fetch the files easily, but you still need to install them. See This page for how to get files from github.

If you do not want to build a new binary, you can manually copy the runtime files to the right place:

% cd vimgithub/runtime
% cp -rf * $VIMRUNTIME

Find out the value for $VIMRUNTIME inside Vim:

:echo $VIMRUNTIME

Catches:
- This will NOT remove deleted files (using rsync might work better).
- Some updated scripts may not work with with an older Vim binary

Another method which directly overwrites the files:

% cd $VIMRUNTIME
% wget https://github.com/vim/vim/archive/master.tar.gz -O- |tar zfx - vim-master/runtime/ --strip-components=1